Cyberpunk: Dogtown Legend

"Song So Mi... are you really free?

Me? V? I ended up as just another nobody in Night City. Damn it... I lost Johnny. Panam. Judy...

Yeah. I lost everything..."

...

"Mercer! Wake the hell up and keep drinking!"

'What the hell was wrong with his head?'

An all-nighter and a brutal hangover churned Cade Mercer's stomach. He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to puke.

'Wasn't I working on a Cyberpunk guide?'

'Did I just get dropped into the game?'

Cade spat out bitter beer. When his vision cleared, he saw his drinking buddy sitting across from him on an oil drum.

Fluorescent paint streaked the man's military pants, and his cyberware was covered in glowing tattoos of snarling dogs.

Barghest?!

At the same time, lines of data surfaced in Cade's vision.

[System Notification]

Character: Zilf Sino

Affiliation: Dogtown

Affinity: 40

Note: A liar. Yesterday he swore he was your ride-or-die choom.

Development Value: If your tastes run that rough, knock yourself out.

Milestone Reward: Reach 50 Affinity to receive Body +1 and a pair of authentic sweat-soaked military gloves.

The panel had a nasty sense of humor. Cade's expression tightened.

The rough bastard across from him had a single sunken slab of optical chrome where his eyes should have been. Two dim red beams stared out of it, raising every hair on Cade's body.

Too real.

The man's chrome looked crude enough to have been stripped out of a Scav den.

The floor shifted beneath Cade's boots. Only then did he realize he was inside a moving cargo truck. The sealed compartment was stacked wall to wall with weapons and military hardware, all of it legitimate corporate-grade gear.

He and this so-called choom were the security detail escorting the shipment back to Dogtown.

Cade drew a slow breath and tried to get his thoughts in order. Then he stared, dumbstruck, at the mechanical arm wired into his nerves.

The steel hand flexed with a faint whir of servos. The engineering was precise. The sensation was real.

'Holy shit. People actually built limbs that felt this close to the real thing?'

And there was something even more important.

Light flickered through Cade's cybereyes. A status readout unfolded across his vision.

[Status]

Name: Cade Mercer

Body: 5

Reflexes: 3

Technical Ability: 1

Intelligence: 3

Cool: 4

'So he was not exactly legend material.'

"Did you wake up stupid or what? Fuck." Sino eyed him suspiciously and took another pull from his beer. "Don't tell me your chrome is rejecting again."

"No. Just can't drink anymore. I fold."

Cade raised both hands in surrender. The shock still had him rattled, and he needed a second to breathe.

"Should've known you were soft -"

Sino never finished.

A shrill, scraping noise cut through the dark cargo bay.

"Hello? The fuck was that?"

Cade's hand closed around the rifle beside him on instinct. The body he had fallen into must have been drilled hard, because muscle memory worked the bolt before his thoughts caught up. Metal snapped with a clean, satisfying click.

[Weapon Scan]

Arasaka Nowaki - Power Assault Rifle

'Good enough.'

Sino raised his own weapon and crept toward the sound, hunched low.

Something felt wrong. Cade shouted before he could think.

"Move!"

The side of the truck screamed as steel tore open.

Hot wind blasted into the cargo bay. Cade grabbed for an emergency handle just as the truck slammed on the brakes. Every crate in the compartment broke loose and skidded in one violent wave.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

Cade hugged the rifle to his chest. Sino barely had time to react before a stack of crates pinned him down. Then the whole world lurched and began to roll.

'They're flipping.'

Cade's cyberarm surged with a harsh electrical whine. He drove his elbow into the smart lock behind him.

The rear hatch blew open, and the force of the crash hurled him out of the truck.

He curled both arms over his head on pure instinct.

Impact.

Cade smashed into blistering asphalt. Synthetic skin scraped across the road, filling the air with a scorched, chemical stink.

Vitals streamed through his cybereyes. Fractures. Impact trauma. Pain, bright and brutal, flooding straight into his skull.

'Shit. I'm going to flatline.'

'Stay awake.'

A sharp, almost holy clarity surged through his body.

The Pain Editor had kicked in, dumping fresh chemicals through his system.

'Don't lie down. Not here. In this world, dead bodies were cheaper than ammo.'

Cade dragged his numb body behind a roadside boulder and sucked air through his teeth. He checked the rifle by feel, then risked a glance toward the wrecked convoy.

Whip-crack.

A round sliced past close enough for him to feel the heat. His cybereyes tagged the shooter's position at once.

Cade fired blind toward the source and scrambled, half rolling and half crawling, toward another cluster of rocks.

"Clean them all up! Especially the ones still moving. Don't let them run. These Barghest bastards love biting back after the job's done."

The man barking orders was huge, broad as a wall, with an old-school action-hero buzz cut. He shoved a shotgun against a Barghest soldier's skull and pulled the trigger.

He noticed Cade too, slipping from cover to cover like an eel.

Say what you wanted about Barghest. Their combat training held up.

"Maine! Maine!"

A mohawked man with absurdly oversized arm chrome hunched forward as he ran. He lobbed a grenade and blew a few surviving Barghest off their feet, yelling the whole time.

"That Barghest punk's damn Power rifle just bounced a round off my hand! You know this is my favorite pair!"

Behind his new cover, Cade froze.

'Maine?'

'Why did that name sound so familiar?'

The incoming fire kept getting sharper. Cade could not tell if they had Tech weapons on the field. If one of them punched a shot through the rock, he was dead.

Gravel sprayed behind him.

An armored vehicle covered in Barghest graffiti fishtailed to a stop at his side. The roof-mounted turret hammered the road, spitting brass in a steady stream.

"Mercs, the whole damn lot of them! Get in!"

Half of Sino's face was smeared with blood. One arm hung useless at his side. He kicked the passenger door open and shouted at Cade.

Cade dove into the passenger seat. Harsh rock music shrieked from the speakers. He cranked the window down, leaned halfway out, and poured fire at the hijackers using the wrecked trucks as cover. Ricocheting Power rounds sent every head on the other side snapping down.

"The cargo!"

"What?" Sino shouted over the music. "Oh, the cargo?"

He did not even have time to kill the radio.

"Fuck the cargo. We delta now, choom!"

If Colonel Hansen found out an entire truck of military supplies had been lost, he would make them regret surviving.

Cade's stomach tightened.

But Sino was right. You could worry about cargo after you were alive.

The vehicle roared as Sino floored it, kicked the rear end around, and tore off in the opposite direction across the sand.

"They're running!"

Maine tapped the comm behind his ear.

"Rebecca, those two gonks are yours."

"Yeah, yeah."

The edgerunner sitting on a weathered rock shook out her pigtails, made a face, and stood. The gun in her hands was almost as long as she was tall.

"These bastards really want us all dead, choom." Sino spotted the figure cutting them off in the distance. He twisted the wheel with one hand and reached for the missile control built into the Barghest vehicle.

"Eat rocket, asshole!"

Sino's hand slapped toward the launch button.

Cade's cybereyes adjusted their visual range automatically.

On the rocks ahead, a short edgerunner stood in the desert heat, twin-tails whipping in the wind.

Her information flashed across Cade's vision.

[System Notification]

Character: Rebecca

Affiliation: Night City

Affinity: -10

Note: She would love to put a shotgun blast through you right now.

Development Value: Variable potential. She may become a legend someday. Want to get stronger? Want to make this broken world a little less broken? Try getting close to her.

Reward: Unknown

Pain throbbed through Cade's temples. The panel burned crimson through his optic feed, and memories from his old life surged up.

In the timeline he remembered, Rebecca was supposed to die beneath the black tombstone of Arasaka Tower, crushed by Adam Smasher until there was nothing left of her.

'No.'

'This was not the fucking time to get soft.'

Cade gritted his teeth and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Then agony tore through his shoulder.

"Shit."

The Pain Editor had suppressed the dislocated bone from the crash, but the recoil and high-speed fire had made it worse. Worse still, the editor's effect was fading.

"Gah! Fuck!"

Cade forced himself through the pain. Rounds spilled into the Badlands dunes in a storm of metal and screaming electric guitar.

But after the first shot, his arm would not obey. He could no longer control his aim. Bullets went wild in every direction.

"Goddamn it!" Sino yanked the wheel, dodging the return fire as the vehicle skated left and right across the gravel. "Does that psycho have an RPG?"

Cade grabbed the handle with his other hand and shouted through clenched teeth.

"How the fuck would I know?"

Rebecca dove away from the iron rain.

'Barghest were launching missiles now?'

Her pulse spiked. She almost painted the passenger side with a full burst.

She rolled through the dust, the barrel of her gun glowing hot. Firing on the move, she sent a slug screaming toward the driver's side. In the chaos of ricocheting Power rounds, the shot clipped the tire instead.

"Oh, fuck!"

Sino stomped the accelerator. Both men grimaced like they had been strapped into a busted roller coaster. The crippled vehicle barely stabilized, then screamed toward the horizon on a ruined wheel.

Cade had almost taken a round to the face. Rage and fear hit him at the same time, and he shouted out the window.

"Fuck you, Rebecca!"

The two Barghest soldiers got away.

'Wait.'

The guy hanging out of the passenger window had been shouting at her. At her.

'Was that asshole taunting her?'

The smoke thinned. Rebecca sat in the dirt, face streaked with grime, furious and confused all at once.

"Hold up..."

Her eyes narrowed.

"How the hell did he know my name?"

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